"The Lost Center" and the Promised Land of Greek Criticism

"The Lost Center" and the Promised Land of Greek Criticism Artemis Leontis Crisis, sometimes represented by the figure of the lost center, was a salient feature of discussions about art and culture in Europe from the end of the 18th through the beginning of the 20th century. For various Romantic writers it meant the divestment of the naive and pure disposition. Significantly they attributed to the bards of ancient Greece the purity lost to them and measured their own sentimental and self-conscious attitude against the harmony of experience and utterance which they fastened on their spiritual ancestors.1 The opposition, Greek against modern, remained intact for the Victorian social critic Matthew Arnold. He identified the loss to be one of moral authority; in the face of threatening anarchy he called for bold reforms that aimed to recover the "lasting truth" and perfection of the culture of "sweetness and light," Hellenism.2 Following the turn of the century some heralds of modernity, finding themselves on this side of history, announced a conscious and deliberate break with the past and a search for new forms of expression;3 they reckoned as their ambiguous gain the loss of the central authority of ancient prototypes such as the Greek, and thus hastened the crisis of dissolution.4 In Greece things developed in a different way. The first articulation of a threatening crisis came late, and corresponded chronologically not to the beginning of the debate but to its end and the espousal of a break with tradition by other western European artists. The historical event of the catastrophe of Asia Minor in 1922, proving the impossibility of recovering the eastern cultural and religious center, Constantinople, incited talk of crisis. With this disaster Greek intellectuals sensed that the figure of the lost center had found literal fulfillment and so become history. Greece would now forfeit its theoretically privileged position, once translatable into a dream of restoring the foundations of western culture to an intact center and confirming the new state's ties with a perfect origin; it too would become secondary , hence modern. 175 176 Artemis Leontis For literature the scene of loss acquired its anti-hero in 1928 when Kostas Karyotakis violated faith in the constancy of poetic value by his notorious act of violence against himself. This gesture marks the beginning of the critical discussion that is of concern here. Its topic was the crisis of value in Greek poetry, exemplified by the figure of the lost center. The Greek attempt to recover this lost center needs to be examined in relation to the discussions of inevitable loss which were begun by Romantic poets and philosophers of western Europe one and a half centuries earlier. What distinguishes the Greek position is an unresolved confusion about its own orientation to the modern: whether to identify itself with modernity or with its own homonymous other, the métonymie signifier for purity and continuity , the "Greek. ' ' This dilemma became the focus of all efforts to recover poetic value and so transformed the Greek discussion of crisis into one about Greekness and the effort to redefine aesthetic values into a scramble to recover national identity. In what follows, I aim to sketch the course and outcome of the Greek debate and situate it in the context of romantic discussions of crisis. I will note the articulation of terms as they are initially disputed , using as my source the famous dialogue about poetry between Konstantine Tsatsos and George Seferis (1938). In this first phase, two responses to the issue of crisis are drawn: an anti-modernist and a pro-modernist affirmation of Hellenism. Next I will examine how Zisimos Lorentzatos in "The Lost Center" (1961) transforms the debate between Tsatsos and Seferis about tradition and modernity into one about east and west and so gives to aesthetic and national concerns a moral and ideological dimension showing the way toward a religious resolution to crisis. Finally I will read Lorentzatos' proposed solution against Friedrich Schiller's argument that the achievement of the perfectly integrated disposition attributed to the Greeks is unattainable by poets of his own sentimental age. By relating Lorentzatos' promise to Schiller's disavowal of perfection I...